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“Rosebud”
By David Glenn Cox
Henry Ford helped to develop the mass production of automobiles and amassed a fortune. He then took that fortune and built Green Field Village, a collection of historic homes and shops to represent what nineteenth-century America was like before Ford’s invention helped to destroy it.
Charles Lindbergh was the first man to fly the Atlantic Ocean by himself, and he then took his fame and used it to preach political isolationism. Now Rupert Murdoch, media tycoon and Satan’s co-conspirator, has a new idea. His journalism ventures, like print and online ventures around the world, are losing money. Most of the revenue loss is due to a drop in advertising because of the gaping hole in the economy.
Anyone who has read any of Mr. Murdoch’s publications knows well that his business model is more about being profitable than being good or even accurate. Murdoch is the anti-Gutenberg, the Genghis Kahn of journalism. Why, any self-respecting planet would have put him in a NASA rocket and made him the first man on Mars long ago.
Mr. Murdoch’s vision for returning to profitability is to create a “paywall” that won’t allow Google or other search engines to aggregate Murdoch’s news content. Murdoch tried this with the Wall Street Journal, and the plan has failed miserably. This time he’s back, partnered with Bill "Broken Windows" Gates, trying to create a consortium to live behind the “paywall.” Gates has been trying to angle out Google with his own Bing search engine. You can almost see the snow globe slip from their hands, “Rosebud!”
Murdoch said in an interview on Sky News Australia this month that he may remove the company’s content from Google searches. The company’s newspapers include the Times of London and the New York Post. Media News, based in Denver, will block Google News from the content it puts behind a so-called paywall early next year at newspapers in Chico, California and York, Pennsylvania.
These two are seeking to put the genie they helped to create back in the bottle without ever realizing that she’s not a genie at all but a fat lady that can neither sing nor dance very well. Pay for News Corp product? A tax on the stupid! Henry Ford helped to create mass production, but most everything he attempted after that point was detrimental to the company, and Gates is following the Ford Model.
Gates tying himself to Rupert Murdoch is like tying yourself to John Wilkes Booth to sell more theater tickets. Windows revolutionized computer operating systems but since that point the Microsoft name has become synonymous with shoddy and poor performance along with a host of anti-competitive lawsuits. Gates loves the Capitalist system that made him fabulously wealthy so much that he wants to buy it.
If these people had their way, they would charge you for reading a newspaper left behind on a train. They are the sickest example of greed; they see news and public discourse as their private product. You wanna know where that hurricane's at out in the Gulf? “How much money you got?” Recently Fox went through the subscribers at Justin TV and threatened them with lawsuits for showing fifteen-year-old reruns of the Simpsons and Futurama.
Sometimes three hundred people were watching, but to the Fox minions up in Xanadu, those people are stealing nickels from us! The easy solution would have been to require them to play an advertising spot every thirty minutes. “Watch The Simpsons and all your favorites on Fox!” Instead their attitude was: stop it! It’s mine! Or “Just think, Smithers, if I had them all killed, they’d try to put me in jail!”
The fatal disconnect in this scheme between the dark lord and his sidekick, bad-haircut boy, is the ability to go around any walls that they might build. In the end they will only marginalize themselves; the walls they erect to make us pay for their content will only mark the borders of their Xanadu. Murdoch can walk its halls and admire its gems and antiquities like the phony crowd scenes behind Michele Bachmann at her anti-tax rally or the racist cartoons from the New York Post.
The beauty of the Internet is that there is always somewhere else to go. Always someone willing to accept ad revenue alone to build their readership. Personally, I read very little on American news websites. I prefer overseas sites for their different perspective, and I don’t read anything on Murdoch’s websites because I don’t have to. I already know what they have to say. Ditto with Bing, nothing hurts your prestige quite so much as who your partners are. Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas.
They are men who have had their great ideas and who now spend their lives trying to reinvent them until they ruin them or are replaced. Men surrounded by wealth unimaginable yet who dream every night of more! More and more because it fills them with a purpose; it fills the empty halls of Xanadu. They’ve come to believe that because of their power and wealth all of their ideas are great, and they surround themselves only with those who agree.
Nothing is quite so newsworthy to the public as watching the self-destruction of the powerful and the arrogant. It makes for a hell of a story as the snow globe rolls and smashes to the floor. Pitiful remembrances of once happier days, “Rosebud.”
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